Plague Doctor

The silence stretched out for a while.

“Wu Siyu, may I ask you a few questions?” Gu Jun asked, his tone laced with curiosity.

“Sure.” Wu Siyu looked at him. “You want to know what your friends or girlfriend’s names taste like, right?”

“Erm… Yes, but they are just my friends.” Gu Jun both wanted to know the answer and wanted to get to know Wu Siyu, so he began this topic. He decided to leave Xiao Xu for now. People with AS had their own rhythm. Clinical research showed that they would not voluntarily interact with other if they were not familiar with other people.

“Fine, I’m used to being treated as a parlor trick anyway.” Wu Siyu sighed as she slumped in her chair weakly. “Give me their names.”

Gu Jun obliged. “Okay, what about Cai Zixuan?”

“Hmm, Cai Zixuan…” Wu Siyu moved her lips and narrowed her black eyes. “Tastes like homemade soup, not bad.”

Gu Jun was instantly startled as surprise overwhelmed him. ‘This girl… If this is a not a set-up, then she must have read Cai Zixuan’s file before…’

In any case, he understood why Wu Siyu had been invited her. Her synesthesia must be the kind that was very intense.

“What about Wang Ruoxiang?” he asked.

“Hmm.” Wu Siyu started to munch again. “What is this? So strange… Damn, formalin!”

She almost rolled down from her chair. Her face paled, and she coughed with difficulty. Her eyes reddened like she was hit with a mist of formalin. She repeated to herself, “Yao Ming, Yao Ming!”

Gu Jun’s heart raced even faster. He had the urge to peel open her brain to inspect it. How did her neural sensors connect to certain specific information about the stimulus? His name was salty? It suddenly hit Gu Jun. It was the sea. Seawater was salty. Longkan seabed…

But…

“Yao Ming?” he asked.

After calling Yao Ming as if her life depended on it, Wu Siyu slowly calmed down. She groaned with bitterness. “Is your friend dead? Of course Yao Ming. Yao Ming is the most delicious name I’ve tasted. Tasty and incredibly fulfilling.”

She adjusted herself and slumped back in her chair.

“Okay…” Gu Jun answered. The girl could literally survive on names. People needed imagination still, but she only needed to think about people’s names.

“That’s enough out of you.” Wu Siyu rubbed her belly and sighed. “I’m too full already.”

The perceptive experience of a synesthete was as real as it could be; some could even close bodily reactions. This kind of ‘illusory effect’ was not limited to people like Wu Siyu. It worked on normal human beings too, albeit not to such an extreme extent. The most common example would be the placebo effect. Patients were offered vitamins in the guise of actual medicine, but they often reported actual recovery in their symptoms. Some clinical tests of new medicine would have placebo groups for comparison to lessen the bias the testers might have toward the drug. Even though medicine had not arrived at a conclusive consensus about this phenomenon, they were certain it had something to do with psychological influences.

“Let me tell you, ‘Yao Ming’ tastes like the best food in the world,” Wu Siyu said as if making a recommendation. “Shark fin soup, bear paw…”

“Okay…” What else could Gu Jun say? ‘I will try it next time’?

If he was not a medical student and his own S value was only 51, he would have run out of the room there and then. If Wu Siyu was placed in public and exposed as a mental patient, people would buy his story, and with current medical standards, she would be diagnosed as one too. But then again, following current medical standards, he himself would not only be diagnosed as a patient of mental stem tumor but of schizophrenia as well.

‘Schizophrenia? Now that does make me feel like I belong here,’ Gu Jun thought self-deprecatingly.

“Your instinct was very accurate,” he told Wu Siyu. “Cai Zixuan likes to cook, and his specialty is soups. Wang Ruoxiang is a medical student like me, and she encounters formalin a lot.”

“Hmm, hmm.” Wu Siyu closed her eyes lazily. “It used to be not so accurate, but lately, it has gotten so much more on the nose. Oh well.”

‘If this was not a set up, then some kind of incident must have happened to her recently too,’ Gu Jun thought. ‘Some kind of incident like his.’

He did not bring that up but continued to chat casually with Wu Siyu. She was not particularly a chatter box, but at least she made an interesting chatting partner. On the one hand, she was mysterious and hard to read; on the other hand, she was strangely boy-hungry.

Xiao Xu continued to maintain his silence. Gu Jun noted that the boy had not moved a muscle. He was like a statue, and that could not help but draw attention.

Right then, the door of the room creaked open. Gu Jun and Wu Siyu turned to look and saw a middle-aged man walk in. It was the Elder Tong they had seen in the picture. Currently, Elder Tong was casually dressed in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops. He held a beer bottle, and a drunken smile hung on his face.

“The three of you are all here, wonderful! I am Huang Guotong.” Elder Tong walked over happily. “I’ve heard so many things about the three of you.”

Elder Tong walk up to Gu Jun and landed a sound slap on his protective gear. “Gu Jun, remove this thing. It gets in the way.”

“Er…” Gu Jun had not encountered a superior like this before. Even though Brother Qiang and Uncle Dan were kind, they were sticklers for the rules. But this Elder Tong was completely different… Gu Jun was reminded of what Prof Qin had said. ‘He is a very unique person.’

“Do you need me to help you?” Elder Tong wiggled his fingers and grinned salaciously.

“Elder Tong!” Gu Jun hurried to stop him. “Please don’t. I know you are only helping me, but I volunteered to be isolated. This is for the sake of everyone’s safety.”

“You sure are one hell of a cautious dude.” Elder Tong halted, but he landed another slap on his helmet. He chuckled. “But this thing can only isolate micro-organisms. Can it isolate the other things? Micro-organisms are not the only way to transmit diseases in this world.”

Gu Jun was startled. ‘A transmission method or source that’s not a micro-organism? How much does Elder Tong know?’

Xiao Xu’s presence was still not noted. Slumped in her chair, Wu Siyu looked at their exchange with some interest.

“All of you are seen as crazy or almost crazy, a virus that should be swept out of Phecda,” Elder Tong said as he walked to the corner to pull out the movable whiteboard. “Back then, I was just like you, but I was actually kicked out of Phecda. However, now, I am here. As you must’ve noticed by now, I share a philosophy different from them. I know each and everyone of you here is a priceless treasure.”

Elder Tong regarded them like how one would look at three gold nuggets, his eyes overflowing with greed.

“I wish to create a new Special Mobile Force unit with you three as the core! Temporarily, we only have three members, but more will join in the future. I am sure of that. But how is it that our unit will be different from others?

“Burp…”

Elder Tong burped from the beer. He grabbed the marker pen and wrote down a term on the board.

‘Spells.’

“Other than fighting ability and survivability, we are going to become a super unit that possesses the ability to use spells.”

The three others were silent, like cynics at an MLM meeting, but Elder Tong was filled with determination and continued with passion.